


On the Other Side of the Wall

by Riverchester



Series: s13 - random thoughts and Codas [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Reality, Apocalypse, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Post-Episode: s12e23 All Along the Watchtower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 14:31:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11969340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riverchester/pseuds/Riverchester
Summary: Mary finds herself trapped behind the rift with Lucifer and expects to die any second. But after being rescued by a bearded man she has to face the possibility that this might be a long-term stay for her and meets a bunch of people who live in this apocalyptical world for a long time.Can be seen in a temporal connection to the first fic in the series, but doesn't have to be read together.





	On the Other Side of the Wall

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everybody. As season 13 draws closer, I had some ideas what the apocalyptical world behind the rift could look like (just my imagination).
> 
> This fic is based on Andrew Dabb's comment at sdcc this year that "some people, who have long been dead on our show, are less dead in the apocalypse world". It got my mind spinning and this is what came out.
> 
> Love to everyone and I hope you enjoy it :)

It’s not what Mary had intended, getting trapped with Lucifer behind the glowing rift, but if it saves her boys, and their world, from this evil, supernatural being, so be it. She didn’t lie when Kelly asked her if she would die for her sons. With the radiant line disappearing in front of her and a growling, very angry archangel right next to her, she realizes that this will be the end. After coming back from the dead, having missed 33 years, she never really felt like she’d belong to this world anymore. If this is where she’ll leave again, she’ll go in peace. Still, she will fight tooth and nail against it. She’s a hunter after all, and she’s a Winchester.

“No!” comes the scream from Lucifer and Mary turns around, looking the devil directly in his tense face.

“You Winchesters always have to be a pain in my ass. You always sacrifice yourself for each other. But now you made a huge mistake, mommy,” the archangel goes on and punctuates his words by stepping closer to the woman in front of him. HIs anger and desperate rage is tangible. “you trapped me here, away from my son, and you will pay for it in every way possible.”

“Then why don’t you start?” comes her answer. She knows she technically has no real chance to win this, to come out of this fight alive, but she won’t submit and beg for her life. He won’t spare her, whatever she does, so the only thing left for Mary is fight the devil or die trying.

Lucifer practically throws himself at her and puts all his anger into his punches. Mary can defend herself at first, thanks to the Enochian brass knuckles, but the longer their blows go on, the more obvious becomes the archangel's advantage. Luckily, his powers seem not to be at one hundred percent in this alternate reality, but at least his stamina exceeds Mary's own.

Her knuckles are already bloody, both from her own blood and from her opponent’s, and while she is able to land some pretty nasty strokes to the devil’s face, he counters more often than not with one himself.

Eventually, her hurting arms and legs let her punches grow heavy and more exhausted, lower in speed and strength, so Lucifer can grab her left wrist and twist the arm painfully. Mary knows that this can be over now really quick, as her left arm is of no use anymore. The elbow is probably dislocated.

Lucifer notices her pain and throws himself into the punches with doubled force. Soon, all Mary can do is defending herself as much as possible, but one particularly brutal jab sends her off her feet.

She is on the ground, clutching her elbow, and tries to get away from the man grinning down at her.

“You know, it’s been strange at first, only fighting with my fists, but now that I have you here, on the ground to my feet, it’s very satisfying to beat the life out of your body with my own hands. But don’t worry, we won’t have to say goodbye soon. I’ll spare the vital parts for later,” Lucifer states, boiling over with self-confidence.

They hear a loud thunder and their vision gets blinded by twitching light above them turning brighter every second, while the ear shattering noise grows louder. It seems to not only paralyze Mary, but the archangel, too. He is looking up into the sky wide-eyed. Utter disbelief and shock, maybe even fear, is written all over his face.

The next moments are like slow motion. At first, she doesn't notice the figure approaching them at all, and even when she does, her body reacts not a bit. It's a man, head to toe dressed in battlefield gear and with a scarf partially covering his face. He is running to her and once they're only a few feet apart, he seems to scream something, but Mary's hearing capacity is still limited with the loud roaring around them.

"We need to get away from here. NOW!" he grabs her by her shoulders and speaks directly next to her ear.

Mary lets herself be dragged to her feet and follows this stranger up a hill, slipping on the dried dirt, but going on without looking back. The light around them is still white and bright, but the noise gets weaker the longer they run, only to be replaced by a ringing in her ears.

The place, where she got trapped with and fought against the devil just minutes ago, disappears from her view, shielded behind hills and the dust filled air around them.

The stranger and Mary only made a few hundred meters in distance, when the sky literally is falling down.

They hear a deafening sound shortly before the ground under their feet quakes. The man rushes to Mary’s side, pull her to the ground with him and tells her to cover her eyes just seconds before everything around them gets absorbed in white light.

She doesn’t know for how long they stay in this position, it could have been seconds, minutes, or even an hour, but eventually a hand taps her on the shoulder and Mary carefully opens her eyes. It’s darker now, still bright daylight but compared to before, it looks like night. She brings her eyes up to the man, who has saved her, not only from Lucifer but from something else, something more powerful. He apparently removed the scarf from his face in the meantime, as she can actually look him in the face now.

“You’re Bobby Singer,” she says, recognizing the man in front of her from photos Dean kept in his room.

“And you are Mary Campbell. From what I learned today, I guess you’re not from this universe. You came through the rift,” Bobby answers.

“Yes. And it’s Mary Winchester, actually. Campbell is my maiden name.”

“Hm,” the older man mutters, “So that’s been probably your sons I met earlier.”

“Sam and Dean, yes,” Mary says and winces as she holds her injured arm close to her body, “thank you for saving me.”

“How bad is your arm?” Bobby points to the wound.

“I think the elbow is dislocated. And I may have some bruises. Is there a place anywhere here I could get some supplies?” She lets her view wander around the area. It’s distressing. Mile over mile of dead, dry land covered in corpses here and there. It’s a battlefield and it has been for quite some time.

“There’s a local base, not far from here. Maybe an hour by foot. I was going to bring you there anyway. You think you can hold on until then?”

“Sure.”

They strike off and stay quiet for the first fifteen minutes. Mary takes in the scenery again, but there isn’t really more to see. Death and destruction pave the way, wherever she looks and they have to stop for a moment to kill a demon. It’s nothing she has ever seen before, like the demon she knows from home have evolved, and she’s glad Bobby seems to be used to them and efficiently shoots a bullet through the monster’s head.

After that, they start talking, reluctant at first, but Mary needs to know more about this reality if it’s where she will spend some time from now on. They explain to each other similarities and differences between their universes. Mary learn about John Winchester and Mary Campbell dying years ago. They were never married and never had kids and this is probably why the apocalypse started.

“So, this white light we saw earlier were the angels?” she asks when the topic comes to the occurrence of her being trapped with Lucifer.

“A death squad. They noticed the energy coming from the rift, just like I did, and they send a unit with a soul blast to destroy and kill everything within a hundred yards around it,” responses the bearded man.

Mary nods and thinks back to the shaking and tremor of the ground below her, when the angels attacked. “Do you think they killed Lucifer?”

“Maybe, maybe not. If he was stupid enough to stay where he was, probably. But I don’t think so,” Bobby doubts out loud and then goes on in his explanation of what happened in the last fifteen years.

The sun begins to set when they finally arrive at their destination. Amidst impressive scenery of rubble mountains and overgrown brick buildings a narrow path leads them to a partly hidden area with tents and small cabins. They approach a wooden and iron gate, guarded by armed men.

“You should wait here, I need to talk to someone first. There are some people in there, who knew Mary Campbell and it could cause a stir to walk in with you,” Bobby explains as he turns his attention between the gate and Mary.

“Okay,” she answers, because there is not really a reason to not believe him.

She steps a bit to the side, off the path, and sits down on a stack of damaged car tires, while Bobby reaches the gate and disappears behind it after a short chat with the guards. For Mary, it’s the first time she’s alone in this reality and to distract herself from the thought of how final her situation might be, she takes in the things around her. Even with her life as a hunter, she has never been in a war, out on the battlefield, but this secluded place, and everything she has seen on their way here, looks just like she would have imagined the front line of a battle. It makes her think about that her own world would have been identical if it weren’t for her boys. Sam, Dean and Castiel.

“Castiel…,” she murmurs to herself.

She’d heard her eldest son’s shout, when Lucifer stabbed the angel, and saw the body on the ground before she attacked the archangel with her brass knuckles. It all seems like days ago, but it’s only been hours. She hopes that Castiel will come back, like she heard he did a few times over the years. Sam and especially Dean would be devastated, if not. Maybe they would cry over losing her, too. Maybe they would search for a way to get her back, just as stubborn and confident as Dean had saved her from the brainwash Ketch and the rest of the British mob had done to her.

But she has been absent for over thirty years before, they would adjust to it easily, losing their friend probably hurts more.

Before her thoughts can spiral into more negative domains, Mary can see the gate open again as Bobby approaches her with quick steps.

“Is everything alright?” she asks.

“As alright as it can be nowadays,” he snorts, “let’s get you inside to take care of that arm.”

“Okay.”

Mary stands up from her improvised seat and follows Bobby to the gate. The guards look her up and down suspiciously, but don’t say a word. Being in the older hunters’s company seems to be enough to trust her. For now.

The first thing she notices when they step through the opening is the hustle and bustle. Dozens and dozens of people, some in battlefield gear, some in plain clothes, move efficiently between smaller and larger cabins in an area with the size of a football field.

“We’re about 200 people here right now, but it’s getting more every day. The front line is coming from several sides and our reception camp in Minneapolis fell last week. At least a few hundreds are on their way here. I have no clue how to handle that, but, well, we have to,” Bobby explains.

“Where are we anyway?” This question oddly hadn’t crossed her mind until now.

“South Dakota. I lived about fifty miles from here, in Sioux Falls, before shit went down.”

“Do you know what happened to Lawrence in Kansas?”

“Razed to the ground. Mary died there, actually. I guess it’s been your hometown, too?” Bobby asks.

“A long time ago,” Mary answers reflectively.

They enter one of the larger sheds, warded with multiple sigils, some of which Mary can’t even imagine the function of. It’s relatively dark inside, the room only lit by a lightbulb here and there. The center looks like a conference room with a dark table and about a dozen of chairs around it. A Map is spread out on top of the table with highlighting in blue and red. To the sides of the room, separated by curtains, Mary can see a handful of computers and some shelves with gear.

“This is the command center,” Bobby says as he walks right through the room to a separated area at the back of the cabin, “Rufus is waiting for us, he’s in control here. With me. And I asked Jess to come and take a look at your arm. She’s not in our medical unit, but she knows how to fix you and before we all had time to talk about your situation, I’d rather keep your identity between the people I trust most.”

“I understand,” Mary responses.

Behind a makeshift wall, an older man and a blonde woman, about thirty years old, are sitting at a desk. Both look up as soon as Mary and Bobby enter the small office.

“You really look exactly like her,” the older man says. Rufus Turner, that’s what he introduces himself as.

“Considering we’re more or less the same person, that’s obvious,” Mary answers with a soft smile.

The blonde woman stands up and steps closer to Mary, looking at the details in her face.

“I’m Jessica Moore,” she says and offers her hand to shake, “when Bobby told us about you, I first thought he loses his vision, he’s too skilled to get suckered by a demon or shifter. But an alternate reality? I thought being in the apocalypse, I’ve seen about everything by now.”

“Hard to believe for me, too, at first. But as a hunter you learn pretty quick to adjust to thoughts that doesn’t fit into anything you knew before,” Mary agrees to the other woman.

“You really are like the Mary I knew,” Jessica smiles, “Bobby said your arm got busted.”

“Dislocated. And some bruises.”

“I can only help by relocating it and binding it to your body for better healing. It’s gonna hurt like a bitch, but we’re short on painkillers and have more urgent patients,” she explains.

“That’s okay, luckily it’s my left arm,” Mary answers.

Bobby and Rufus leave the two women alone for a moment and Jessica indicates for Mary to sit down at the desk. She moves closer with her own seat and starts peeling of the remains of Mary’s shirt to inspect the bruises. It’s a cumbersome procedure, Lucifer didn’t hurt her severely, if you exclude the elbow, but he didn’t spare one spot on her body, so Mary flinches every now and then under Jessica’s touch.

“How did you meet Mary?” the older woman asks after a while.

“I went to college in Stanford. My dorm room caught fire one day and I only escaped by a hair. Mary saved me. Apparently, it’s been a demon running amok. Learning about the supernatural and monsters out there, I followed her and she trained me to become a hunter.”

“One of my sons went to Stanford, too. But, well, in my universe,” Mary remembers. Dean told her about Sam giving up law school for hunting.

“We make great hunters,” Jessica jokes but gets serious again, “you probably miss them, huh? I mean, it’s gotta be horrid to not only get separated from your family like this, but also get thrown into the apocalypse.”

“It’s…,” Mary stops for a moment to search for the right words, “it will definitely take some time to get used to. I didn’t know what awaits me on this side, but I saved my boys – at least my sons – so I would do it again. But yes, I miss them.”

“At least your sons? What do you mean?”

“They were friends with an angel, you could even say, he was part of their family. He saved them and he saved me and he was the one who understood me the most at times. Right before I attacked Lucifer and fell into the rift with him, that bastard killed him. Castiel, that’s his name. I hope he comes back. I heard he did it more than once and I know my sons will need him.”

“To say ’I’m sorry for your loss’ may seem no help right now, but I still mean it,” Jessica comforts and gives Mary a reassuring smile.

“Thank you.”

They stay quiet for a few moments while Jessica unwraps a small bottle of alcohol and cotton wool.

“Do you think this wormhole will open up again?” The younger hunter asks while cleaning of a cut on Mary’s forearm. Before Mary can answer, Jessica gives her a piece of fabric to bite on and counts to three before relocating her elbow.

It hurts, not less than before, but Mary still answers Jessica’s question. It’s one she asked herself a few times over the day.

“I don’t know. It came up because of Lucifers child being born. Maybe he can open it again, maybe my sons are trying to open it again with a ritual. Knowing them, they will try everything. But even then, I don’t know where it would open up.”

“It’s tempting. A gate to a universe where the apocalypse never happened. That’s one of the reasons why Bobby and Rufus want to keep your situation a secret. It would be great to get all people on safe ground by this, but it also could cause a lot of trouble. Not only would a lot of _clones_ or _twins_ be walking around in your reality, what if the angels and demons also find their way through the rift. It sucks enough that one earth gets shattered in this fight.” Jessica thinks out loud.

“It’s pretty selfless to think like this,” Mary acknowledges.

The other woman smiles sadly, “It’s still tempting to meet my other self in your reality. Maybe I even finished med school there.”

“I’m sure you did.”

Jessica looks at her for a second, like she considers something.

“Is something wrong?” Mary asks her.

“No, no, I just-. In some ways, you are exactly like the Mary I knew and my mind gets a bit blurry talking to you, but in other ways you are completely different.”

“Anything specific?”

“Not really,” Jessica tries to explain, “just a feeling.”

She finishes binding Mary’s injured arm to her body and stitches a cut on her cheek.

“So, as good as new,” she smiles, “or as good as I can fix it here.”

“Thank you, Jessica,” Mary says which the younger woman just waves off.

“For nothing, really. And call me Jess.”

They both step into the main room of the cabin and join Bobby, Rufus and a young man, looking a bit messy, at the conference table.

“Is your arm better now?” Bobby asks her as he sees the two women approaching.

“I’m gonna survive,” Mary answers and takes a seat right next to the gruffly looking hunter.

“This is Ash, he’s our computer guy,” Rufus introduces the mullet-wearing young man.

“I’m your computer genius,” Ash counters and pointedly runs his fingers through his hair.

“And as our computer idjit, he noticed the energy coming from this rift,” Bobby states.

“It’s so awesome that you’re from an alternate reality,” Ash directs at Mary, “Back at the MIT, they laughed at me for my theories. Unfortunately, there’s no one left anymore I can rub it in the face. Okay, the energy I registered today is not nearly like I imagined it to be, but still, my theory in general is right and – .”

“Cut the shit, Ash!” Rufus and Bobby grumble.

“Okay, okay. Well, as the rift was open for quite some time and I luckily noticed it right away, I was able to gather a lot of data about it and I think it’s enough to do some tests. Maybe, with the right equipment, I could replicate it.”

“You think that would be possible?” Jessica asks.

“I just met someone from an alternate reality! My mind is not capable of declaring it as _impossible_ right now. But it’s definitely gonna be difficult and take a lot of time,” Ash practically shouts.

Bobby is noticeably quiet while the other four vividly discuss pros and cons of the mere possibility of Ash’s plan being successful.

“I don’t know, if I should allow these tests,” he pipes up after nearly ten minutes, “If, and I really mean _if_ , you’ll be successful and open a rift, and this rift will even lead to the reality Mary comes from, what will we do with it? Will we just gather as much people as possible and leave? As I heard my alternate self isn’t alive anymore, but what about others? That’ll mean problems, and huge ones. And will we just leave to let this reality die and hope those bastards from heaven and hell won’t find a rift themselves?”

It’s quiet for a minute after Bobby’s statement and Mary scratches on the tables surface with her fingernails while she considers every argument.

Jessica speaks first. “I think you’re right, Bobby. I want nothing more than this apocalypse to end, to be able to actually live in peace. But we have to consider the price it takes. We cannot safe everyone on this planet, because we’d have to keep these experiments a secret if we want to keep it from heaven and hell. And if the rift opens, we don’t know how long it will stay. Maybe we’ll be able to save ourselves and it closes again, but what if it stays open the next time? I don’t want to be responsible for throwing this other universe into turmoil too.”

Bobby and Rufus nod slightly and Ash sighs.

“What do you think, Mary?” Rufus asks.

“Me?”

“Yeah. You’re the only one who knows the other reality.”

“Would I like to go back and be with my family, if possible? For sure. But I wouldn’t want to risk it if the outcome could be that both universes end in chaos and destruction.”

Everyone at the table seems to be frightened by the consequences of what their arguments mean, but it is determined for them to not open the rift again. And still, Mary hopes that her boys will find a way to save her. After all what happened in just this one day, her will to survive is stronger than before.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so, what do you think? I would pay good money to see the brothers really finding a way to open the rift and then Sam meeting alternate-Jess.
> 
> As always: you are welcome to inform me about severe grammatical or vocabulary mistakes (I just skimmed the text for editing) and also to leave kudos and comments (only if you want) <3


End file.
